Night Photography at Mt. Baker

We had a very dark, cloudless, moonless night at Mt. Baker last weekend. That, coupled with being so remote from the city lights, made for ideal conditions for taking pictures of the stars.

Campers and the Milky Way

I'm relatively inexperienced with taking nighttime photos, but I got some tips from Stanley, one of the guys in the Canadian hiking contingent. Though I'm still not very good at it, I managed to take a blurry picture of the Big Dipper.

Big Dipper

And below is a picture Mt. Shuksan at night. The two bright spots on the mountain are from hikers' headlamps.

Hikers on Mt Shuksan at night

I think one of the big errors I made was not taking raw format pictures, and do the post-processing myself (instead of the camera). Imperfect pictures regardless, it was a treat to be able to see the night sky in such darkness. The last time I remember a sky so dark and clear is way back when I was a kid and we had regular blackouts in my home town of Cotabato. I remember sitting on the rooftop marveling at all the stars.